- Qualcomm’s new autonomous driving platform is based on Snapdragon family of automotive system-on-chips
- The company may make it available for pre-development to automakers and tier-one suppliers in the first half of 2020
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), has unveiled its newest addition to the company’s portfolio of automotive products with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon Ride platform. It is an scalable and open-autonomous-driving-solution, which consists of the family of Snapdragon Ride safety system-on-chips, Snapdragon Ride safety accelerator and Snapdragon Ride autonomous stack.
“Today, we are pleased to be introducing our first-generation Snapdragon Ride platform, which is highly scalable, open, fully customisable and highly power optimized autonomous driving solution designed to address a range of requirements from NCAP to L2+ Highway Autopilot to Robo Taxis. Combined with our Snapdragon Ride Autonomous Stack, or an automaker or tier-1’s own algorithms, our platform aims at accelerating the deployment of high-performance autonomous driving to mass market vehicles,”noted Nakul Duggal, senior vice president, product management, Qualcomm Technologies.
The company’s integrated automotive platforms across telematics, infotainment and in-car connectivity, have an order pipeline of more than $7 billion.
Snapdragon Ride vehicles anticipated to be in production in 2023
Snapdragon Ride is expected to be available for pre-development to automakers and tier-one suppliers in the first half of 2020. Qualcomm Technologies anticipates Snapdragon Ride-enabled vehicles to be in production in 2023.
The Snapdragon Ride Platform, as informed by the company, is based on the Snapdragon family of automotive SoCs and accelerator, is built on scalable and modular heterogenous high-performance multi-core CPUs, energy efficient AI and computer vision (CV) engines, industry-leading GPU. The platform with combination of SoCs and accelerator can be used as needed to address every market segment offering industry-leading thermal efficiency, from 30 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS) for L1/L2 applications to over 700 TOPS at 130W for L4/L5 driving.
This platform can therefore result in designs that can be passively or air-cooled, thereby reducing cost, and increasing reliability, avoiding the need for expensive liquid cooled systems and allowing for simpler vehicle designs, and extending the driving range for electric vehicles. The Snapdragon Ride SoCs and accelerator are designed for functional safety ASIL-D systems.
“We’ve spent the last several years researching and developing our new autonomous platform and accompanying driving stack, identifying challenges and gathering insights from data analysis to address the complexities automakers want to solve,” added Nakul Duggal.
